He felt she was awake and woke himself, rolling onto his side as though still asleep and facing away from her. He then fully opened his eyes. Of the two windows in the bedroom, the one with the raised shade let in soft light. He let the illusion settle: the desk was a block of volcanic rock, a chair stacked with clothing a moss-covered boulder, a framed print on the wall an oblong shape about to fly, and the floor seemed to drop away.... He was listening closely for her—for any sound or movement, any hint of a mood—but heard only his own breathing and felt only her hushed presence.

He meant to draw both shades earlier. Instead he had stared, looking uphill from the third story: the swath of hemmed-in city yards rose slowly and then steeply as one would see waves when watching the surf behind the break line. A full moon, an Indian summer moon, floated near the top of a wave that would never crash. Moonlight showed a silhouetted forest of fences, trees, and bushes running up the hill. Back-porch bulbs exposed color in spots but mostly he saw moonlight and silhouettes. Like everything else this night, the view was familiar and new, banal and spiritual. He had lit a candle, leaving the shade up of a tall window of a shared Victorian flat in San Francisco.

After a few seconds on his side, he saw the desk become a desk, the heaps of clothing random cloth shapes, the framed print a solid rectangle, and he moved his fingers over the floor. He turned over slowly as though still sleeping. The candle was out, and the moon was down, while dim city-glow showed him that fog had rolled in, which meant the silhouette forest had disappeared.

Instead of sitting up beside her, he propped himself up with the pillow against the wall, not wanting to interfere with her stillness. She turned to him, looking into his eyes, her eyes charcoal sketches but an expression of determination was clear, charged with resignation and anger. She turned back to staring at the window and he sat up, wondering about what he had just seen.

Her face was cameoed against the twilight: a profile of polished darkness. She let the sheet fall, cameoing her shoulders and breasts. She was magnificent—natural and ethereal—because they were creating her together. She was proud of being naked, and close to tears ... she turned to him again to make sure he saw this. She was art, mysterious and simple.

At the party that night, she had stared at and through him from across the room, which dared him to approach her. At his timid “Hello,” she smiled brightly, becoming at once sweet and skeptical, her eyes for an instant going through him again. Talking about nothing, party talk, amused them, so they exaggerated nothingness, continuing with jobs and friends who became foolish the more details they gave. Exaggerated ambitions left them smiling, although a little sadly. They laughed hardest after running out of things to say but felt superior to others as long as they laughed. These were the moments when they forgot their surroundings and were suddenly embarrassed when they saw the crowded party again. They played these moments as though they were true: only each other in the world—which was fun even if not true.

Spending the night together had been her idea, but only after he had held her closely as they walked in the general direction of both their places. Angling in front of her to kiss willing but indifferent lips, he told her that he was falling in love with her and that she shouldn’t believe him.

Under the only flourishing curbside tree they passed, in its rigid shadow from streetlamp glow, he stopped them again. The tree’s canopy muffled city noise. He kissed her believing his lie and she kissed him half believing it.

“Sleeping together is the best way for people to know each other,” she said.

Remembering how matter of fact she had been when she said this, and now staring at her cameoed against the twilight, he told her that he wanted to fall in love with her. She shook her head slightly, got out of bed and dressed. Looking at him askance, she flicked away tears with her fingertips then walked out the bedroom door.

“We agree that nothing important happened here, don’t we?”

After two long breaths, he pulled on a pair of jeans and followed her quietly down the long hallway of the railroad flat, not sure whether he wanted her to look back or not. She must have glimpsed him as she turned to go down the short flight of stairs to the landing which topped the steep staircase to the front door. He stood at the banister staring down at the empty landing until he heard the door shut sharply. Would he remember her for long? Would he think about their lovemaking or how she ran fingers through his hair under the tree’s canopy? When he closed his eyes for a moment, she had kept it up.

After staring out the window, following the silhouettes uphill to the moon, he had lit the candle on the nightstand next to her. He saw her clothing on the floor and began reaching for the covers, but she had pulled them away from his hand. He undressed in front of her. In the light of the candle and moon they had seen in each other’s eyes this wish: this is what it seems.

Robert I. Mann

was born and raised in California, graduated from UC Berkeley (BA, Humanities) and CSU Northridge (MA, English Literature), and has been teaching writing and English and American literature for nearly 20 years in Italy. His short fiction has been published in numerous online and print publications, among them the new renaissance (an international magazine of ideas and opinions); The Pavilion (a literary room for expat writing); Mobius: The Journal of Social Change; The Bitter Oleander; and Volume 7 of the annual Delmarva Review.

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⚡ Two Girls With Jobs, ekphrastic prose poem by Robert I. Mann in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 14, August 2022)